The Left-Wing Split over Brexit

The British EU referendum is a right-wing project. It came about as a result of David Cameron’s need to protect his right flank from the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence party before the 2015 general election, and Conservative-party politicians — Boris Johnson and Michael Gove most prominent among them — who have become the public image of the Leave campaign. But with Leave currently running neck-and-neck with Remain in opinion polling, simple mathematics dictates that the Brexiteer ranks are composed of, at least partly, some Labour voters. And in recent days, as the referendum approaches, a notable number of Labour MPs have come out in favor of leaving the EU.

Those MPs are going against the grain of their party — and bucking the trend of political tribalism — but their case is an interesting one, in some ways more compelling than the arguments put forth by Johnson, Gove, and Nigel Farage (which, for some, veer too close to xenophobia for comfort). Old-time socialist Dennis Skinner, for instance, framed his pro-Brexit stance in a familiar 20th-century way: “My opposition from the very beginning has been on the lines that fighting capitalism state-by-state is hard enough,” he wrote in the Morning Star. “It’s even harder when you’re fighting it on the basis of eight states, 10 states, and now 28.” Consider also the anti-EU case made by Labour MP John Mann: “The EU’s fundamentally broken, it’s undemocratic, and even when you want to get changes — as when David Cameron tried — you can’t get them.” With that argument comes the rejection of any possibility of negotiating reform from within the EU — instead, the EU appears as a politically corrupt organization rotten to its core.

Kate Hoey, a Labour MP who has had a fitful relationship with her party, merged Skinner’s and Mann’s arguments in an op-ed published last week. Sharing Skinner’s hostility to capitalism and Mann’s concern about democracy, she wrote: “The EU is part of the global movement to remove democratic resistance to capitalism. . . . The purpose of the EU, [former European Commission president José Manuel Durrão] Barosso’s ‘antidote to democracy,’ is to remove the opportunity to change anything.” Here the EU stands as an active impediment to the lifelong project of the Left: to construct a welfare state on working-class foundations, to work towards the elimination of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist order.

Mann’s, Skinner’s, and Hoey’s stances may seem out-of-place in the current state of British politics, but they can find strong predecessors in the history of the Labour party. In 1962, when British membership of what was then called the European Common Market first became a political flashpoint, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell declared that a vote to join Europe would mean “the end of Britain as an independent European state . . . the end of a thousand years of history.” Gaitskell laid down five conditions under which Britain could join the Common Market. One of those conditions was the right for Britain to continue to engage in central planning of the economy, a demand whose echoes can be heard in the arguments offered by pro-Brexit Labour MPs in the lead-up to next week’s referendum.

Not only do those MPs have behind them the force of their party’s history; they can also marshal, simply put, a stronger argument than can their leader, Jeremy Corbyn. A radical from North London not quite fit to lead Britain’s opposition, Corbyn is, like the Labour dissidents, no fan of the EU. The list of his Eurosceptic votes and statements is a long and unglamorous one: He voted against the Lisbon Treaty, he favored leaving the European Economic Community in 1975, he accused the EU of responsibility for human-rights abuses in Western Sahara, he harshly criticized the EU’s treatment of Greece, and he once described the European bureaucracy as “totally unaccountable to anybody.” He failed to give his first pro-EU speech until the middle of April, and even then he urged Britons to vote to stay in the EU, “warts and all.”

For a man with an obvious distaste for the European project — The Economist aptly wrote that he views the EU as a “capitalist conspiracy” — what is the case for staying in? This is where Corbyn’s argument enters thorny territory. It goes, in short: The EU in its current form is awash with problems, and the deal Cameron negotiated is entirely wrong — and that’s why Britain needs to stay in.

That was the gist of Corbyn’s bizarre op-ed in in The Guardian in February, the majority of which he devoted to attacking the terms Cameron had negotiated with Europe and the terms on which Britain will remain in the EU should Remain be victorious on June 23. That deal, Corbyn wrote, was intended mostly to protect Cameron’s friends in the City’s financial industry, and the negotiations were essentially “about trying to appease his opponents in the Conservative party, rather than delivering the reforms that would make the EU work better for working people.”

But despite all those misgivings, Corbyn said Labour would campaign to stay in Europe for the sake of building a united front against austerity and a Europe conducive to social justice and jobs. “Europe needs to change,” he said in the April speech. “But that change can only come from working with our allies in the EU.” Last July, before winning the Labour leadership, he phrased the same sentiment in somewhat more bitter terms: “We cannot be content with the state of the EU as it stands. But that does not mean walking away, but staying to fight together for a better Europe.”

Corbyn’s is a weak argument. It begins from the premise that the EU in its current form stands contrary to left-wing ideology and then assumes that, through concerted action, the Left will form a Europe-wide front and dislodge the pro-austerity, anti-democratic nature of Brussels bureaucrats and, more dauntingly, Angela Merkel and the Bundestag. The argument put forth by the pro-Brexit Labour MPs, which urges simply leaving behind the EU bureaucracy to create a New Jerusalem, is far more compelling, and it carries an optimistic vision of the future rather than one rooted in a long and arduous struggle to an uncertain end.

The left-wing argument for Brexit is also more convincing on another axis. The difference between Corbyn’s pro-EU position and the Labour dissenters’ pro-Brexit one comes down to a simple dispute over the purpose of national government. Skinner, Mann, and Hoey believe national governments should protect the interests of the people who reside in the nation, and should act in the nation’s interests. Corbyn believes — or at least espouses a belief — in a more cosmopolitan creed, one in which the people of Britain must do what they can to protect working people across all of Europe, not merely on their own islands. Cosmopolitanism is already a tough sell to voters, but Corbyn’s version of it, which requires not merely associative ties but also an active and ongoing political battle, is even more of a stretch.

The weakness of Corbyn’s perspective, which focuses not on the interests solely of the British people but rather on the supposed interests of all Europeans, is that it is the one that led to the anti-democratic mess of the EU in the first place. National voters will favor representatives who vow to act in their constituents’ interests; bureaucrats in Brussels face no such electoral constraints. The pro-Brexit Labour argument, however, holds the key to recovering parliamentary sovereignty and the right of Britain to govern its own affairs in their entirety — something that is impossible under the EU’s current arrangements and would be impossible under Cameron’s renegotiated terms as well. Not only would Brexit, as the Right argues, represent a vital component in reinvigorating the moribund strains of contemporary democracy; from a left-wing perspective, it can also be the crucial step in freeing Britain from the EU’s overarching capitalism and developing a renewed leftism in the United Kingdom. Perhaps it is also the key to reclaiming the Labour party’s lost identity.

The British pollster Marcus Roberts currently reckons that a Leave victory would require four in 10 Labour voters to back Brexit. Given the weakness of Corbyn’s argument for Remain and the strength of Mann’s, Skinner’s, and Hoey’s arguments for Leave, that should not be viewed as an impossibility.